About Dara
With roots in numerous cities including Philadelphia, Chicago, Atlanta and Jackson, MS, Dara Cooper is a national organizer with the National Black Food and Justice Alliance (NBFJA), an alliance of Black led organizations working towards national Black food sovereignty and land justice. She is also an anchor team member of the HEAL (Health Environment Agriculture and Labor) Food Alliance, a cross sector alliance of organizations working to deeply transform our unjust food system. She previously completed a project elevating racial justice and food systems infrastructure work (such as food hubs and co-ops), after completing a southern tour interviewing Black farmers, co-ops and food hubs throughout the south in partnership with the Center for Social Inclusion (now Race Forward).
Dara serves on the leadership team for the Movement for Black Lives policy table, working to link the struggle against mass police and state violence with environmental, health and nutritional violence against Black people. In August of 2016, the Movement for Black Lives’ policy table introduced a Vision for Black Lives policy document providing a comprehensive set of policy demands from over 50 contributing organizations.
Dara is the former director of the WK Kellogg funded NYC Food and Fitness Partnership in Brooklyn, NY where she worked on creating and strengthening farmers markets for Black farmers, developing a community based local food hub and creating a farm to headstart program in Brooklyn partnering with Corbin Hill Food Project, a local food hub. Prior to this work, Dara led the launch and expansion of Fresh Moves (Chicago), an award winning mobile produce market with community health programming, which quickly became a nationally recognized model for healthy food distribution and community based self-determination and empowerment.
Recently her brother was arrested for allegedly "sagging" on campus walking to his dorm room at Hinds Community College in Mississippi. He (like many other Black students attending Hinds) was arrested, strip searched and sent to a penal farm. As a food justice activist and prison abolitionist, she finds the existence of penal farms to be an affront to her life's work and is on a mission to see that all penal farms and ultimately the prison industrial complex abolished.
A former Uganda Bold Food Fellow (exchange program between professionals in the U.S. and East Africa), Kalamazoo Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership Food Justice Fellow, and a National Alliance Against Racist Political Repression Human Rights Awardee, she believes deeply in the quote from Assata Shakur: “imperialism is an international system of oppression and, we, as revolutionaries, have to be internationalists to defeat it.”
Dara is also a member of Black Urban Growers, a member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and the former contributing editor for the Environment, Food and Sustainability section of Praxis Center, an online activist academic journal housed at the Arcus Center for Social Justice at Kalamazoo College.
Dara serves on the leadership team for the Movement for Black Lives policy table, working to link the struggle against mass police and state violence with environmental, health and nutritional violence against Black people. In August of 2016, the Movement for Black Lives’ policy table introduced a Vision for Black Lives policy document providing a comprehensive set of policy demands from over 50 contributing organizations.
Dara is the former director of the WK Kellogg funded NYC Food and Fitness Partnership in Brooklyn, NY where she worked on creating and strengthening farmers markets for Black farmers, developing a community based local food hub and creating a farm to headstart program in Brooklyn partnering with Corbin Hill Food Project, a local food hub. Prior to this work, Dara led the launch and expansion of Fresh Moves (Chicago), an award winning mobile produce market with community health programming, which quickly became a nationally recognized model for healthy food distribution and community based self-determination and empowerment.
Recently her brother was arrested for allegedly "sagging" on campus walking to his dorm room at Hinds Community College in Mississippi. He (like many other Black students attending Hinds) was arrested, strip searched and sent to a penal farm. As a food justice activist and prison abolitionist, she finds the existence of penal farms to be an affront to her life's work and is on a mission to see that all penal farms and ultimately the prison industrial complex abolished.
A former Uganda Bold Food Fellow (exchange program between professionals in the U.S. and East Africa), Kalamazoo Arcus Center for Social Justice Leadership Food Justice Fellow, and a National Alliance Against Racist Political Repression Human Rights Awardee, she believes deeply in the quote from Assata Shakur: “imperialism is an international system of oppression and, we, as revolutionaries, have to be internationalists to defeat it.”
Dara is also a member of Black Urban Growers, a member of the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, and the former contributing editor for the Environment, Food and Sustainability section of Praxis Center, an online activist academic journal housed at the Arcus Center for Social Justice at Kalamazoo College.
Fresh Moves Mobile Market
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